The Clarion Call of ISIS

British Muslims are losing the war against ISIS. So says Sunny Hundal in a new essay in Quartzmagazine.

“For the vast majority of Muslims who disdain its ideology,” he writes, “the challenge that [ISIS] presents to them is deadlier and far more difficult because they are caught in a pincer movement: with public and government suspicion on one side, and a seductive and supposedly empowering ideology on the other.”

According to the FBI, around 200 American Muslims have left the United States to join ISIS. And according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 600-700 British Muslims have left the United Kingdom just this year alone. The grand total of British Muslims running off to join ISIS is well over 1,000.

Compared to just 200 Americans.

The number of Muslims in each country is almost identical at roughly 2.7 million apiece. So British Muslims at least five times more likely to join ISIS than American Muslims.

Why? For at least three reasons. As Hundal notes, two ideas have been bouncing around in the British Muslim community for years—that Muslims should travel abroad to defend their fellow Muslims when necessary and to strive for a caliphate—an Islamic government—if and whenever possible.

American Muslims don’t find these ideas quite so compelling, and I suspect that’s for reason number three: The United States is a nation of immigrants. A foreign-born person can become American in a way that he or she simply can’t become English or Scottish or Welsh or French or German or anything else except maybe Canadian. National identities in the United States and Canada are based far less on ethnicity and religion than in the old world, where national identities have much longer histories that stretch back hundreds and sometimes even thousands of years.

Assimilating into mainstream American culture isn’t easy, but there’s a well-worn path trod by nearly every family in this country. The process itself is part of our identity.

Both British and American Muslims are more likely to join ISIS than Al Qaeda. Which isn’t the least bit surprising. Al Qaeda does nothing but kill people. Its record is naught but destruction.

But ISIS has actually built something. It’s appalling, of course. The Islamic state is a blood-soaked totalitarian prison. But so was the Soviet Union, and it, too, inspired huge numbers of people all over the world to take up arms and violently create knock-offs, from Cuba and Vietnam to South Yemen and even Somalia and Ethiopia.

We should never underestimate the appeal of a utopian fantasy in the human psyche even if it is drenched in blood.

Some people who find these utopias stirring deny that they’re drenched in blood. Others make excuses. (You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.) Still others are attracted to these ideas and places because they’re drenched in blood. Jihadi John, the Kuwait-British man who beheaded a string of jumpsuit-clad journalists and aid workers on camera, is clearly some kind of psychopath. So are the ISIS fighters who serially rape their captured “war brides.” So is Lisa Borch, the 15-year old Danish girl who fell in love with an Islamist extremist and stabbed her mother to death with a kitchen knife.

There’s an upside to the exodus, I suppose. Britain and the United States are better off without these people. If they didn’t run off to Syria, they’d be living down the street. We’d have fewer Jihadi Johns and more Lisa Borchs.

Syria sure as hell isn’t better off with these people as “immigrants,” but they’ll eventually die there when the Islamic State, like every other monstrous utopian entity, either destroys itself from within or is destroyed from without by fed-up outsiders.

When it finally happens, whether it’s next year or two decades from now, the British and American Muslim communities will be, on average, a little more politically moderate and sane than they are now.